Adam Richman is engaged in a perpetual stunt to bag the biggest, grossest food. He takes on five-pound nachos, 72-oz. steaks, and overstuffed burritos. It’s an epic battle pitting Man v. Food. And he doesn’t always win. (Which may be why he’s also a spokesman for the stomach antacid Zantac.) While Richman’s high-profile show on the Travel Channel has captivated thousands, he’s hardly alone when it comes to stunts involving the stomach.
Dozens of writers and bloggers are courageously following Richman and the pioneering lead of George Orwell (who went down and out in the kitchens of Paris and the hop fields of Kent) and Ted Conover (who rode the rails with undocumented farm workers), spawning a whole genre of diet stunting from the confines of their homes. Call it the new immersion food journalism, which offers the curious fusion of shock jock and Jackass.
Why do these experiments appeal to people? Are we just trying to make sense of over-abundance, so much so that we’ve turned to food as cheap entertainment? Or is there something legitimate at stake? If so, what exactly are they trying to prove?
Here are a couple recent stunts worth thinking about:
The Twinkie Diet, aka Prof. Haub’s Diet Experiments
For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a human nutrition professor at Kansas State University, ate a Twinkie every three hours, along with some Little Debbies, Doritos, and Oreos. When all was said and done, he lost 27 pounds—in what he said was an attempt to show the supremacy of calorie counting over nutrition.
After the USDA failed to include white potatoes in the list of foods it provides through the Women, Infants, and Children Program, Chris Voigt, who does marketing for the Washington State Potatoes Commission, decided he would nourish himself exclusively with potatoes. Now, after a month, he’s shown that it is entirely feasible and entirely boring to live off potatoes for 30 days.
Image: Mr. Grumpy Potato, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from banger1977's photostream
Andrew Wilder, of Eating Rules!, and 200 bloggers signed up for a month-long escape of the big bad world of processed foods. They went for “any food that could be made by a person with reasonable skill in a home kitchen with readily available, whole-food ingredients.” Sounds like...cooking.
Image: Active cooking at Foodlab Stockholm, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from frykfors's photostream
Locavores have weathered some cheap shots since “local” has become just another excuse to mark up a dish's price by $10, but this stunt involves regional foods from all over the world—Malaysian noodles, herring from Scandanavia, and ribs from Chez Panisse—shipped to Brooklyn. Writer Brett Martin made it into the Best American Food Writing 2010 and it sort of made me salivate, but what’s it really saying? FedEx makes globalization possible?
Image: Fedex Man, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from yourdon's photostream
SNAP challenge, aka Eating on $31 a Week
Monica Eng, a James Beard-award winning journalist at the Chicago Tribune, attempted to live on $4.50 a day, the amount food-stamp recipients receive. She did it for one week and then concluded she was happy to have the luxury of eating more expensively.
Image: American coins (also a jigsaw puzzle ), a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from uhuru1701's photostream
Earlier this year, April Dávila decided to eliminate everyone’s favorite agribusiness-to-hate from her diet (and wardrobe) for one month, which she discovered was practically as difficult as holding your breath for that long. Eventually, Dávila discovered that the combination of Hollywood Farmers’ Market and Google could ensure her vegetables, meat, and Glenfiddich scotch were free from Monsanto's ever-growing tentacles.
Raw for 30 Days, aka “Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days”
Remember Morgan Spurlock, the filmmaker who made Supersize Me, in which he ate McDonald’s every day for a month and documented his exploits? (He gained some weight and made a lot of money doing this.) Well, the film spawned the lesser-known Detox Diet and now Spurlock has shifted to shilling in favor of raw food pseudoscience.
In the end, while some of these stunts aim deep at our perceptions about food, I think they all come off as shallow. The problem with diet stunts is that they don’t serve to expose much. Sure, it’s helpful to know how pervasive one company’s products are or that it’s possible to be healthy only eating potatoes. The problem is that in “discovering” the underside of processed fast food, supplemental nutrition programs, or Twinkies, it allows the rest of us to pretend we weren’t previously aware of these things. And if the solution to what ails us involved revealing the perils of the current food system, we would probably be living without them already.
Image: Vegetables in Whole Foods Market, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from forever5yearsold's photostream
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| The Twinkie Diet and Six Other Ridiculous Diet Stunts by Peter Smith |
Adam Richman is engaged in a perpetual stunt to bag the biggest, grossest food. He takes on five-pound nachos, 72-oz. steaks, and overstuffed burritos. It’s an epic battle pitting Man v. Food. And he doesn’t always win. (Which may be why he’s also a spokesman for the stomach antacid Zantac.) While Richman’s high-profile show on the Travel Channel has captivated thousands, he’s hardly alone when it comes to stunts involving the stomach.
Dozens of writers and bloggers are courageously following Richman and the pioneering lead of George Orwell (who went down and out in the kitchens of Paris and the hop fields of Kent) and Ted Conover (who rode the rails with undocumented farm workers), spawning a whole genre of diet stunting from the confines of their homes. Call it the new immersion food journalism, which offers the curious fusion of shock jock and Jackass.
Why do these experiments appeal to people? Are we just trying to make sense of over-abundance, so much so that we’ve turned to food as cheap entertainment? Or is there something legitimate at stake? If so, what exactly are they trying to prove?
Here are a couple recent stunts worth thinking about:
The Twinkie Diet, aka Prof. Haub’s Diet Experiments
For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a human nutrition professor at Kansas State University, ate a Twinkie every three hours, along with some Little Debbies, Doritos, and Oreos. When all was said and done, he lost 27 pounds—in what he said was an attempt to show the supremacy of calorie counting over nutrition.
After the USDA failed to include white potatoes in the list of foods it provides through the Women, Infants, and Children Program, Chris Voigt, who does marketing for the Washington State Potatoes Commission, decided he would nourish himself exclusively with potatoes. Now, after a month, he’s shown that it is entirely feasible and entirely boring to live off potatoes for 30 days.
Image: Mr. Grumpy Potato, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from banger1977's photostream
Andrew Wilder, of Eating Rules!, and 200 bloggers signed up for a month-long escape of the big bad world of processed foods. They went for “any food that could be made by a person with reasonable skill in a home kitchen with readily available, whole-food ingredients.” Sounds like...cooking.
Image: Active cooking at Foodlab Stockholm, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from frykfors's photostream
Locavores have weathered some cheap shots since “local” has become just another excuse to mark up a dish's price by $10, but this stunt involves regional foods from all over the world—Malaysian noodles, herring from Scandanavia, and ribs from Chez Panisse—shipped to Brooklyn. Writer Brett Martin made it into the Best American Food Writing 2010 and it sort of made me salivate, but what’s it really saying? FedEx makes globalization possible?
Image: Fedex Man, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from yourdon's photostream
SNAP challenge, aka Eating on $31 a Week
Monica Eng, a James Beard-award winning journalist at the Chicago Tribune, attempted to live on $4.50 a day, the amount food-stamp recipients receive. She did it for one week and then concluded she was happy to have the luxury of eating more expensively.
Image: American coins (also a jigsaw puzzle ), a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from uhuru1701's photostream
Earlier this year, April Dávila decided to eliminate everyone’s favorite agribusiness-to-hate from her diet (and wardrobe) for one month, which she discovered was practically as difficult as holding your breath for that long. Eventually, Dávila discovered that the combination of Hollywood Farmers’ Market and Google could ensure her vegetables, meat, and Glenfiddich scotch were free from Monsanto's ever-growing tentacles.
Raw for 30 Days, aka “Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days”
Remember Morgan Spurlock, the filmmaker who made Supersize Me, in which he ate McDonald’s every day for a month and documented his exploits? (He gained some weight and made a lot of money doing this.) Well, the film spawned the lesser-known Detox Diet and now Spurlock has shifted to shilling in favor of raw food pseudoscience.
In the end, while some of these stunts aim deep at our perceptions about food, I think they all come off as shallow. The problem with diet stunts is that they don’t serve to expose much. Sure, it’s helpful to know how pervasive one company’s products are or that it’s possible to be healthy only eating potatoes. The problem is that in “discovering” the underside of processed fast food, supplemental nutrition programs, or Twinkies, it allows the rest of us to pretend we weren’t previously aware of these things. And if the solution to what ails us involved revealing the perils of the current food system, we would probably be living without them already.
Image: Vegetables in Whole Foods Market, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from forever5yearsold's photostream
